Dear Readers of Mine: I'll do my best not to get political on my blog here, especially since the main focus for it has always been sharing artwork and giant monster-related trivia, but I'll gladly make exceptions for insidious situations such as the Federal Trade Commission's latest naked attempt as screwing over the lowly citizen (you and me alike) COPPA. Short for The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA is a openly naked excuse for both the Federal Trade Commission and big corporate government in general (regardless if there's a republican or democrat in office) to ruin the lives of regular citizens, consumers, and aspiring creators alike. It's also terribly telling how YouTube (the company and its holders alike) is playing dumb and trying to wave COPPA off as some minor inconvenience in their own videos on the matter, suspiciously buried beneath some lesser-yet-no-less-vexing changes to their service. Like many of my closest friends, I absolutely hate that we have to fight against this establishment-based madness seemingly every day now (SOPA, Net Neutrality, Ajit Pai, etc) but COPPA, by comparison, is truly heinous and needs more way attention before it's to late. Link to a Major Petition Against COPPA:http://chng.it/kLnwsSJzFv
Link to FTC for Comments (try to be civil, please):https://bit.ly/31XAEXJ The following collection of videos that are also about COPPA and how we can, hopefully, fight against it. Please share this article wherever and whenever you can, -Sincerely Enshohma
Brian Hull - Coppa and the Future of My Channel.
Direct from Faith's Take:All of your favorite creators could be losing their livelihoods thanks to YouTube complying with COPPA. Go give them all the support you can. It could be the beginning of the end for us all starting on January 1st.
Direct from Creator Fundamentals:Fight Back Against FTC COPPA. The upcoming changes regarding YouTube FTC COPPA are very concerning to many creators. They could mean a significant loss of revenue and other obstacles that will be difficult to overcome. BUT there is still time to fight back! Watch this video to see what YOU can do before time runs out.
Chadtronic - Marking “Not For Kids” Doesn’t Protect You - COPPA Update
Direct from Anime America: Amazing Channels like Phantomstrider, Chadtronic, Arlo, and myself could be in trouble if the FTC carelessly judges our channel because we talk about animation and video games; two categories that are "mostly" associated with children. Because Youtube broke the law, a lot of channels could potentially shut down if the FTC "believes" they are exclusively targeting children. Lets make our voices heard! Animation and video games are NOT all for children!
Direct from Ian Corzine:YouTube is not telling you the whole truth about COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) and the consequences are disastrous. FTC fines of $42,530 per video, video de-publication, and worse the loss of your channel. In today’s video, I take you through an in-depth history of COPPA, YouTube & the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), including when the FTC fines YouTube. I tell you what you can expect from COPPA & YouTube as of January 1, 2020.
FINALLY! I've been vindicated! Kind of. YouTube producer and reviewer TitanGoji (an extremely nice fellow in person) does a great service towards an ungrateful tokusatus fandom, huh, I mean "humanity" and shares his extremely negative (rightfully so) review of the truly terrible live action film adaptation of demonic superhero manga DEVILMAN (2004).
Seriously, it's nice to see someone relatively popular among the current tokusatsu fandom lay into this film because this crummy mess has TOO MANY DAMN defenders online! Perhaps loyal Devilman fans who's never seen this film what-so-ever but will defend the franchise regardless and at all costs? Or an anime fan who doesn't like it when their genre-of-choice is being criticized even if said criticism is limited to one minor aspect that really does suck regardless? Even I know that's a stupidly blind thing to do! Fandom loyalty isn't worth dying on a poorly rendered hill of CGI demon bodies for! Seriously though, this film is terrible and makes most other anime-to-live-action-adaptations look like honorable B+ efforts by comparison - something that TitanGoji goes into further detail towards the end of this accursed film and the sordid production history behind it.
There is an alarmingly massive amount movie reviewers and related retrospectives online with an even smaller number of which dedicated to some semblance of serious film appreciation beyond the mainstream weekly film review outlets. Than there are those bizarre yet wonderful movie lovers who balances both extremes but never abandoning the latter (analysis) over the former (funny business). Among this rare breed is the always entertaining YouTube channel Good Bad Flicks, overseen by its uniquely named host Cecil Trachenburg.
Recently, Good Bad Flicks posted a sincere video asking for help to keep up their channel's quality so that they won't have to resort to desperate advertising measures as The Unfathomable Beast Dubbed YouTube continues to breath down their undeserving backs (excessive word usage is fun). Seriously though, this channel could use all the love and support it can garner (here's the Patreon page) even if its just through shared awareness among your own friends online.
With the recent loss of www.cyberkids1954.com, an old Japanese site dedicated various fantasy film productions that were never made (including some extreme obscurities that would cause your common Godzilla fan's brains to melt and pour out from their ear-holes), I've decided to use Enshohma's Corner as a archival back-up for any and all giant monster obscurities that I may stumble upon... Even if some of my own knowledge on the featured materials are as limited as your typical Godzilla fan, I must sadly admit. I'm no August Ragone but I freaking doing my best, okay?!?! *Ahem* Nothing major for this first attempt, just a little show and tell, showcasing an awesome illustration from the Japanese children's book "Original Reprint Edition: Ultra Q" (rough translation). This illustration features a 'what if' scenario where the creatures Gorgos, Cicada Human, and M1 in mortal combat with each other.
What makes the artwork even more intriguing is the fact that both Cicada Human and M1 were small human-sized characters in the original "Ultra Q" series and have never achieved giant monster status even in their later return appearances. So it's honestly cool to find this image and see both of them pumped up to Gorgos' level even if M1 (the ape-like fellow in the lower right corner) is still relatively puny, looking like he's barely 16-feet in height when compared to the fleeing humans on the opposite end. As for the 'Giant Cicada Human'; I honestly have no idea what's up with that yellow scarf wrapped so stylishly around his neck. At first, I thought it was a direct reference to another insect-theme character from Japanese fiction, the iconic Kamen Rider, but that notion seemed doubtful as that grasshopper-inspired superhero was still five years away from "Ultra Q" original broadcast.
However, the book's title of "Original Reprint Edition: Ultra Q" may suggest that the yellow-colored sight gag was both timely to Kamen Rider's 1971 debut and, as such, most deliberate.
Get it? Spoof of The Hiromi Gargantua? It's a play on War of The Gargantuas! No? Ah, nuts to you! Anyways... The long running anime series Mobile Police Patlabor is often cited as a strong example of the 'Realistic Mecha' genre from Japanese fiction. Realistic Mecha is where giant robots are presented as plausible machinery that could exist and work within the real world while also avoiding the more fantastic clichés of most other giant robot stories such as alien invaders, supernatural power-ups, soulful sentience in the machines, and giant Godzilla-style enemy monsters. However, there are several exceptions seen throughout the Patlabor franchise where wacky monsters do appear and cause havoc, betraying the very concept of Realistic Mecha.
Yes, between giant albino alligators, unmanned killing machines, out-of-control Labor robots, deep-sea reptiles, genetically engineered mega-rodents, hideous human-alien hybrids, and gigantic Kappa androids, this otherwise unassuming franchise about police officers piloting 30-foot-tall police-bots in the near-future has a lot of giant monsters popping up. This continuous trend started with The 450 Million-Year-Old Trap (July 25th, 1988): the third episode in the original direct-to-video series and was an early directorial effort from the now famous director Mamoru Oshii, one of the forgotten grandfathers of Patlabor. A series of mysterious incidents occur in and around Tokyo Bay, including damaged undersea cables and a parked car being pulled off a pier, leading some to believe that it could be the work of an actual sea monster. Detective Takahiro Matsui of the Metropolitan Tokyo Police Department (a recurring character in the franchise) requests Captain Goto, head of the Police Special Vehicle Section 2 Division 2 (SV2 for short), for help on the strange case. Goto and his SV2 Patlabor team help pilot a remote control submersible Labor to search for what caused the incidents. However, the Labor is destroyed during its underwater search, convincing all present that the monster truly does exists. The SV2 are given orders to kill the monster soon after but not before they stumble upon the giant creature's origins: an life-form birthed from a science experiment gone...a little out-of-hand thanks to a well-meaning but clumsy and shortsighted mad scientist.
Although this sea monster is largely off-camera throughout the episode, its noted that the artificially created being went through various stages of accelerated evolution (presented in a brief montage of resurrected prehistoric animals) until reaching its supposedly final form which makes its rather anti-climactic reveal by the story's end. As you can tell by now, The 450 Million-Year-Old Trap is a subtly played spoof of Toho Studio's classic run of giant monster movies, complete with a big blue-colored War of The Gargantua homage shown throughout this article. Now we could call this unnamed guy 'The Blue Gargantua' for obvious reasons but, based on an odd little twist in the tale where this somewhat benign beast shares an unexplained resemblance with SV2's team member Hiromi Yamazaki, the ironically tall man from Okinawa who's soft-spoken and kindhearted, I shall nicknamed this character The Hiromi Gargantua until I'm corrected otherwise with an official moniker.
RELATED VIDEOS ON PATLABOR:
Marc of Oh No Anime takes you through the life and legacy of one of anime's most under-appreciated franchises, Patlabor (direct video link right below video box).
I know you younger people and more tech savvy individuals are enjoying the virtually unlimited promise of streaming services with the variety of programming it offers. However, with the way things are going now, with every company creating their own streaming channels, limiting their libraries to only the most marketable and recent fair, a reliance on syndicated show packages from the same handful of entertainment monopolies, and phasing out older films and television shows in turn, I feel like it's only a matter of time until streaming services will become the same miserable wasteland that modern cable television has long ago become. A television wasteland where we literally have thousands channels but with nothing interesting to view beyond the same 44 reruns of BIG BANG THEORY and the original CHARMED scattered across multiple networks. I don't care if you're a fan of BIG BANG THEORY or not, but 20 channels playing the same set of episodes is NOT a good thing: that would be like going to a grocery store that only sells french fries and only the same brand of french fires in all fifteen of its aisles. You probably don't believe me, of course, but this nifty video from FredFlix perfectly illustrates the wonderful if not offbeat variety of film and TV programming we use to have on cable entertainment, back in the day when you could be up at 2AM and have a wide choosing of rarely shown movies to watch as opposed to today.
